ANIMATED INSIGHTS BY SHANNON MUIR – now called SHANNON MUIR’S ANIMATED INSIGHTS – takes you inside Shannon’s latest reflections on her passion for animation as a medium, and other animated insights about life. To catch up on all posts, check out the Animated Insights portion of the website!
Some may be wondering why I chose to use a Tumblr such as http://tumblr.com/shannonmuirvoltronpages in order to continue my discussions on my and my sister’s 1980s VOLTRON fandom now that I am locked out of being able to further modify the Shannon Muir’s Voltron Pages website. The question is a fair one. There are two main reasons.
- One has to do with the image heaviness of what I need to present. I was able to recover a lot of my 1980s fan materials only by taking screenshots of an old family Apple II that was able to boot up and read the files before we put everything into storage. My websites have a limited and shared image storage capacity that I try to focus using for the FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY web comic.
- I also felt a strong need to control what would be able to be searchable by large language models, especially since I know that fan fiction has been scraped for these programs.
- Lastly, I wanted people to feel they had a safe space to ask questions. A logged in medium seemed the only way to do that.
If for some reason Tumblr goes away, I would find an alternate source, first hopefully one with the walled environment, but ultimately public blog if I needed.
However, I also think it is fair for someone to see in advance what the Tumblr site contains before opening up an account to access that content. So, I am going to reproduce one of the sample posts here, one of the smaller ones. Most posts have eight to ten images each as part of their makeup, of which a written analysis is attached. Interestingly enough, it also documents one of the rare times I have used a large language model to help me document and analyze some of the choices we made in the 1980s after the fact.
The following analyzes two premises we wrote of the first twenty two beyond the much better known first few with Nina’s introduction as well as several of her friends, Elinor and Wally. Elinor is very much a plot point in this sample. We also see that not only do Nina and Lance marry (as occurred in her introduction), but they would also be the first to have second generation children in our take on narrative events. We already wanted to see moving the story forward.
Below is an analysis of two of our fan created premises from 1985 that were sent to World Events Productions as part of the batch of twenty-two. Neither have been altered from their original version.
SHANNON MUIR’S VOLTRON PAGES – The Premises for “Lancelot” and “Back in Action” from 1985
There’s a lot of time skipping that goes on here logistically. I can say that we definitely did not see these as sequential episodes. We could tell there were multiple writers on a series and figured they would do episodes in between these, seeing these more as “tentpole” episodes. Bear in mind we had no idea that so few new episodes would air in Fall of 1985 (these were written in parallel to the episode being produced, though we didn’t know it at the time).
This is the first time Lance returns from a mission, we haven’t seen him anywhere near Red Lion for a while. Remember, he wasn’t in the last two at all. I began to wonder how credible that storyline between episodes 8 and 11 might be. So, I embarked on once of my first major use cases of AI and large language models. Please understand that I am generally not a fan about using these models, particularly in creative writing. But I needed them to perform analysis where I could not be objective.
Figuring that both models should know the 1984 canon Lance personality as a baseline, I started to run a series of events in both ChatGPT and Google Gemini as to the logistics of how this scenario might play out. I did not name the wife or use anything about the White Lion, but rather just said they were both pilots and that the wife in particular had previously been brainwashed by the Drules.
I found out that the intent, if not all the particulars, actually were credible. Additionally, I learned the Gemini model is trained far too much on Voltron: Legendary Defender fanfiction; we would get a distance into running those scenarios because I would keep needing to remind it which personality to use when after a while Lance piloting Blue Lion and/or references to Shiro started showing up.
There were a lot of disagreements, but ChatGPT and Gemini consistently agreed on the following ideas:
- Though realistically the setup doesn’t quite work for Nina revealing herself after the crash (she should realistically be way too hurt for that), a major crash would sideline both her and Lance. At bare minimum, they’d both be out for a while for PTSD counseling. Think about it – Lance has gone from newly married to near-widower in a short time, and his wife (Nina here, generic wife in the AI simulations) has nearly died and unknowingly been pregnant a while to boot. She likely wouldn’t be off bed rest for months.
- Substituting another pilot in Red would be problematic. Since the models didn’t have the concept of the White Lion or the other characters, I gave them a reference they did know, which was Sven. Scenarios using Sven to try to temporarily fill in for his friend so they could still form Voltron were disastrous, and also taught me a lot about how and why Sven should not regularly go back into a lion. His PTSD issues would be even larger.
- Lance coming back and flying and his wife giving birth offscreen would be more than a 1980s storytelling need or the ideas about men of the 1980s. Due to the health risks, a natural birth would pretty much be off the table in this case. Lance also would have likely have been cleared to return to duty before her, so this could easily be him easing back into the cockpit because his personality would not allow him to play “sit and wait”. So he’s not being insensitive per se.
As to the naming thing:
- Both models agreed Lance would totally try to name a son “Lancelot” or “Lance Jr” or something that reflected him based on 1984 personality. But something else that came out unprompted is that the wife consistently vetoed the name Lancelot; though he was a heroic knight, the wife was having none of the Arthur and Guinevere connections (not that we were fully aware of those at that age, in all fairness).
- In hindsight, I am not sure what they would have ended up naming a son.
As to the ship christening for Elinor:
- Nice storytelling parallel, but I don’t see Nina up and about yet, much less being able to as a mother leave behind her newborn and go off and see her friend. I didn’t run that through the models. It’s just obvious to me. Nice attempt on storytelling for our ages, though. We saw a grander theme of new family and new beginnings.
“Back in Action” has trouble tracking for similar reasons. I know I said these were considered tentpoles to us, but given what I picked up from the tests I did on the plots regarding PTSD, the combination of that and child bonding make this one less than realistic.
This particular episode is difficult to understand without reading the posts about Nina’s introductory episodes (parts one, two, three, and four). For reasons not fully explained or explored, Nina is finally able to make mental contact with the granddaughter of the jungle foster family that raised her – in our rendition, Haggar started out as someone with strong capabilities from a jungle world who could tap into ancient magics but gets twisted along the way.
Again, a well meaning parallel into family drama, but it struggles to hold up. However, Ladira potentially holding a grudge is important because… Nina Season 1 spoilers.
For more analyzes like this, including images of other characters originally created, check out the Tumblr site.